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Thanks to the artist herself, Hennessy Fyah, we had a chance to feature her new song “Rude Gal” on our 18 Karat Reggae Facebook page. Hennessy Fyah has always blessed us with images for our page, so when she sent the song to us, we were more than happy to feature it.   As always, when we get a new song, we always ask the listeners to rate the song as savage, average or garbage and that’s what we did for this song.

When we here at 18 Karat Reggae listened to the song, we thought that the lyrics were actually pretty good but the instrumentals were very weak. Weak in the sense that there is hardly any reggae or dancehall influence in the beat. The bassline was not attention grabbing. In fact, it sounds like something that came ready made in those 90s Casio keyboards. We are not being disrespectful to the producer, just stating from a listener’s perspective that they could have done a lot better job on the instrumentals. They could have also done a better job on the arranging, voicing, mixing and overall production.

So we were not shocked that many people were rating the song as garbage. We were disappointed, however, when the artist’s race was brought into question. To me a song should stand on its own merit. If a song is good, it is good; if a song is bad, it is bad; regardless if the artist is Black or White.

Someone even went as far as to compare Hennessy Fyah to Iggy Azalea and saying that she is a culture vulture. Reggae fans have to understand that when we want others to embrace and enjoy our music, we can’t place restrictions on how they should embrace our music. We can’t expect others to be just consumers of the music but prohibit them from producing said music. We can’t hope that others will spend their money to buy CDs, download our music and come to a show, but then get angry if they go into the studio and create a dancehall song. The home of reggae and dancehall is Jamaica but the music has no borders or boundaries, only bridges.

As for Hennessy Fyah, I think she just needs to work more on perfecting her craft and delivery.   The lyrics are pretty good and witty, I like when she said:

Some gal waist out a line
Dem listen too muck Alkaline

I also like when she referred to ladies with hair from China trying to look like Beyonce and Rihanna. She needed a better rhythm to drive those great punch-lines home though. She mentioned that she loved old school dancehall like Shabba Ranks’ “Wicked in bed” and I actually believe that an old school dancehall riddim would have suited her better. Imagine “Rude Gal” being voiced on the “Wicked in bed” riddim.